Chapter 22. Multi-Platform Configuration (Autoconf Functionality)

SCons has integrated support for multi-platform build configuration
similar to that offered by GNU Autoconf,
such as
figuring out what libraries or header files
are available on the local system.
This section describes how to use
this SCons feature.

This chapter is still under development,
so not everything is explained as well as it should be.
See the SCons man page for additional information.

The basic framework for multi-platform build configuration
in SCons is to attach a configure context to a
construction environment by calling the Configure function,
perform a number of checks for
libraries, functions, header files, etc.,
and to then call the configure context's Finish method
to finish off the configuration:

SCons provides a number of basic checks,
as well as a mechanism for adding your own custom checks.

Note that SCons uses its own dependency
mechanism to determine when a check
needs to be run--that is,
SCons does not run the checks
every time it is invoked,
but caches the values returned by previous checks
and uses the cached values unless something has changed.
This saves a tremendous amount
of developer time while working on
cross-platform build issues.

The next sections describe
the basic checks that SCons supports,
as well as how to add your own custom checks.